Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)

"The drama of terror has the irresistible power of converting
its audience into its victims." (Melmoth, p. 257)

Life

1780 born in Dublin, into family of line of clergymen; descended from French
Huguenots -- Calvinist group, persecuted by Catholic majority in France --
when Edict of Nantes (1598) was revoked in 1685 many fled to Britain.

-- although, father resigned clergy to work as senior official in Post
Office; gave him distinguished wealthy position in Dublin.

-- one of 6 children, but apparently the only one to survive into adulthood

1800 graduated with BA from Trinity College

1803 ordained: curate of Loughrea, Galway in remote country

1804 married Henrietta Kingsbury, renowned beauty and singer; her brother
was Archbishop of Killala

1805 moved to Dublin as curate of St. Peter's, held until he died in 1824,
stipend about £80-90 per year; lived with father, began to write out of his
own interest; first two novels published at his own expense

1807 first novel: The Fatal Revenge; or, the Family of Montorio,
published under name of Dennis Jasper Murphy (seen as damaging name)

1809 father dismissed the Post Office at age of 64 on false charge of corruption
-- plunged family into poverty (shades of story of Walburg) --

-- Maturin took a large house, using dowry of £2000 from his wife, tutored
students and wrote novels to make money;

1810 praised by Walter Scott in Quarterly Review, Maturin wrote to
Scott in Dec 1812, began a lifelong correspondence; Scott's help to Maturin
in his literary career;

-- preferment in church blocked, both by Maturin's literary productions
and by his extreme Calvinism, not in favour with Anglican hierarchy;

1816 Bertram produced at Drury Lane, very successful, praised by
Byron, but blasted by Coleridge in Biographia (see below); two further
plays failed;

Reviews

Coleridge on Bertram (1817), several pages in Ch. 23 of Biographia,
including:

I want words to describe the mingled horror and disgust, with which I witnessed
the opening of the fourth act, considering it as a melancholy proof of the
depravation of the public mind. The shocking spirit of jacobinism seemed no
longer confined to politics. The familiarity with atrocious events and characters
appeared to have poisoned the taste, even where it had not directly disorganized
the moral principles, and left the feelings callous to all the mild appeals,
and craving alone for the grossest and most outrageous stimulants. (Princeton
UP, 1983, II, 229)

Melmoth: largely slated by reviewers. While one reviewer in Blackwood's
concludes Maturin transcends his forebears --

Mr Maturin is, without question, one of the most genuine masters of the dark
romance. He can make the most practised reader tremble as effectually as Mrs
Radcliffe, and what is better, he can make him think as deeply as Mr Godwin.
(Blackwood's Magazine 8, No. XLIV (November, 1820), p. 168)

-- another finds Maturin's use of his talents dangerous:

There is a burning eloquence--a sarcastic bitterness--an insidious plausibility
about all Mr. Maturin's murderers and demons which well might have been spared.
The taunts against religion are too keen, the invectives against society too
terrible, the spirit of malignant discontent against the order of things established,
is too subtle, too ascetic, and too sustained, to be quite affected; and though
we believe that this author, both in his heart and in his life, contradicts
such doctrines, he may rest assured that the eloquence with which he enables
his devils to enforce them must offend, though it cannot do harm, the virtuous;
and may, perhaps, but too fatally, mislead many who are as yet hesitating
upon the Rubicon of crime. (London Magazine 3 (May, 1821), p. 518)

Melmoth teems with this unsightly progeny--there is scarcely a page
on which crime is not written in letters of blood, and in language of desperate
and ferocious exultation. (ibid, p. 522)

But redeeming feature is its powers of expression:

Its merit is not in the idea, which is compounded from the St. Leon of Godwin
and the infernal machinery of Lewis -- nor in the plot, which is ill-constructed
-- nor in the characters, which are for the most part impossible -- but in
the marvellous execution of particular scenes, and in thickly-clustered felicities
of expression, which are spread luminously over the darkness of its tenor,
like fire-flies on a tropical ocean. (The New Monthly Magazine and Universal
Register 14 (December, 1820), p. 662)

Influences

In letter of 1813 to Scott, Maturin speaks of writing a romance novel:

I am writing at present a poetic Romance, a wild thing that has a Chance
of pleasing more than Regular performances . . . tales of superstition were
always my favourites, I have in fact been always more conversant with the
visions of another world, than the realities of this, and in my Romance I
have determined to display all my diabolical resources, out-Herod all
the Herods of the German school, and get the possession of the Magic lamp
with all its slaves from the Conjuror Lewis himself. I fear however they will
never build a palace of Gold for me as they did for their Master Aladdin.
(The Scott-Maturin Correspondence, p. 14)

Maturin thus hoping to outdo both Lewis and the Germans -- many parallels of
Monk and Melmoth.

-- both novels deal with pact with the devil, although Lewis's monk only makes
this at the end of the novel -- but has difficulty in signing, like Goethe's
(and Marlow's) Faust.

Novel described by reviewers as of the German school: e.g.,

in horror, there is no living author, out of Germany, that can be at all
compared with Mr Maturin (Blackwood's Magazine);

His cast of invention and composition is foreign and meretricious, with much
of the murky extravagance, and a full share of the corrupt and exaggerated
sensibility of the German school. (Eclectic Review).

Melmoth a kind of Mephistopheles on Goethe's model, evil, but a sophisticated
traveller, witty, ironic, has his own sensibilities.

Influence also of Schiller's Der Geisterseher: similar to story of Melmoth
as visitor at wedding, told to Stanton, death of Father Olavida (pp. 34-5);
and rather similar story much later, when Melmoth attends the wedding of his
own bride (pp. 519-22);

-- fearful eyes of Melmoth; ability to change lives of those around him;
abilities taken from Schiller

-- Melmoth's character as like the Wandering Jew of German literature, more
central than incidental appearance of this character in The Monk

English influences

Other influences: Milton's Paradise Lost, for Garden of Eden image of
Immalee on her island; temptation of Melmoth/Satan -- but also mediated by use
of this myth in Frankenstein (1818): Melmoth as Immalee's tutor, educates
her in human society and history as the creature is educated by his reading.

And Marlow's ending for Faust, the noises in the closed room, etc.,
drawn on for Melmoth's ending.

The Monk: scene of mob violence, killing of abbess; cf. Maturin's use
of similar scene, more alarming because more universalized: Moncada as witness,
shares the fury of the mob, p. 256.

But Maturin's interest in overcoming the crudities and gratuitous shocks of
The Monk: no libidinous love scenes, or crude hauntings: more realistic
(compare fate of the lovers in the abbey locked up to starve), greater psychological
accuracy and mythical resonance.

Byronic outcast, inexplicable but heroic suffering:

Yet must I think less wildly. I have thought
Too long and darkly till my brain became,
In its own eddy, boiling and o'erwrought,
A whirling gulf of fantasy and flame;
And thus, untaught in youth my heart to tame,
My springs of life were poisoned. 'Tis too late!
Yet am I changed, though still enough the same
In strength to bear what time cannot abate,
And feed on bitter fruits without accusing fate.

Anti-Catholicism of novel

Maturin's own experience in the West of Ireland; in his novel, institutions
of Catholic church as a cover for power, hypocrisy, and assassination. Cf. Moncada's
resistance to the Director (ex-Jesuit), p. 83: rests on his conscience, sees
Director as mouthpiece . . . Victor Sage's comment on this passage:

Appropriately, it is the issue of conscience which sparks off the rebellion,
for the child is a Lutheran puppet here in the author's hands. The externalizing
of conscience into institutions like the confessional, leaves the individual
Catholic 'free.' Like the Android of modern science fiction, he looks
human enough; but he is completely cold, unscrupulous and devoid of any real
feelings. (Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition, p. 34-5)

Maturin, Sage points out, a part of a Protestant tradition which depended on
demonizing Catholicism. Pointed out by Cardinal Newman in a lecture of 1850,
referring to Fox's Book of Martyrs and similar productions:

we must have a cornucopia of mummery, blasphemy, and licentiousness -- of
knives and ropes, and faggots; and fetters, and pulleys, and racks, -- if
the Protestant Tradition is to be kept alive in the hearts of the population.
(cited, Sage, p. 28)

Flourishing of Gothic genre from 1780s onward in part a reaction to struggle
for Catholic emancipation in England (recall anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780):
e.g., Radcliffe and Lewis writing at a time when Catholics forbidden to assemble
within doors, priests unable to wear their robes, etc. Fears of being subverted,
somewhat like paranoid fear of communism after WW II. (Sage points out that
Emancipation Act of 1829 didn't end the paranoia.)

Calvinist pessimism

So, influence of both German and English predecessors, including Radcliffe
and Lewis: but -- distinctive to Maturin: his pervasive pessimism: evil not
just a disorder in the world; it is pervasive and ineradicable; we can be saved
only by faith . . .

Gothic dimensions: once inside system, no escape. Moncada's story, each time
he escapes, finds himself in a worse state: as parricide monk tells him, there
is no escape from power of church: pp. 219-20

-- Reflects on meaning of other stories: Stanton's curiosity, Moncada's desperate
attempts to escape and find meaning, etc.: that man is more than his natural
endowment and surroundings -- need for a spiritual dimension -- hence purpose
of suffering:

Imagination (cf. Radcliffe's terror) situated under the sign of pain:

As the victim's suffering is prolonged, he becomes, once again, a thinking
and complicated being, but his mind is no longer a register filled with approved
and familiar ideas, but a new world shaped by and shaping the misery it encounters.
As he traces in each of the narratives the history of a mind newly made by
misery, Maturin illustrates a whole phase of romantic psychology and the creative
process. -- Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (1972), pp. 192-3.

Maturin on the value of the romance/gothic tale, setting realities of this
life in perspective. In a sermon:

Where is the being who does not feel that restless consciousness of immortality
within him that forbids him to sit down to the banquet of life while the sword
of destruction impends over him? Man bears witness to the feeling in every
stage of existence. The very first sounds of childhood are tales of another
life -- foolishly are they called tales of superstition; for, however disguised
by the vulgarity of narration, and the distortion of fiction, they tell him
of those whom he is hastening from the threshold of life to join, the inhabitants
of the invisible world, with whom he must soon be, and be for ever. (Sermons,
1819, p. 358; cited in Eggenschwiler, 1975)

Points for analysis

Intensities

Consider role of imagination, rhetoric of sentence construction. Implosions?
Withdrawals of meaning? The necessary alternative.